Opened 16 years ago
#4635 new enhancement
Allow remapping of parallel port addresses
| Reported by: | Donuts | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | other | Version: | VirtualBox 3.0.2 |
| Keywords: | parallel lpt expresscard | Cc: | |
| Guest type: | other | Host type: | Linux |
Description
This suggestion is for when VirtualBox properly/offically supports guest access to host parallel port(s).
Some systems cannot have parallel ports which live at the normal/legacy LPT1/2/3 I/O address ranges. It is possible to add hardware parallel ports to such systems, but the port base address is not the normal legacy value. For example, a laptop with no built-in parallel port can be used with a PCI Express-based ExpressCard parallel card. (The PCI Express parallel port cannot live at the legacy LPT1 address range.)
Most well-written software works with such parallel ports, but much older software is hard-coded to only work with the legacy address ranges.
To be able to use such software, VirtualBox needs to remap accesses to the legacy parallel I/O range to that used by the host's parallel port. So in addition to a direct pass-through, an option to set the I/O address range used for the guest's parallel port would be really useful, and should allow use of software which does not work when run in the host OS.
